Web App Development

A lot of online manual pages today, especially Objective-C are written with full object description in the main body, which makes it very hard to read but very good for search engines. To mend things, we could implement a graceful degradation of certain terms into shorter versions, while using HTML5 abbr and CSS to hide or fade out the full description. We can even offer the option to apply such contractions or not, based on user preferences (some minds may be more comfortable reading the full description). All contractions could be programmatically formatted by the blog (app) engine, based on a key:value pair list of abbreviations and clarifications. Here's an excerpt from such a man page taken from developer.apple.com: Instance and Data Life-Cycles It is important to understand that the life-cycle of the data a managed object represents is largely independent of the lifetime of individual managed object instances. In order to add a record to a persistent store, you must alloc...

After testing and playing with the remap_string function on a real project, I've made some changes and fixes: I've introduced an encoding signature, such that you cannot re-encode by mistake an object that was already encoded. Currently I'm using the ord(ESC)ord(ESC) as signature, which in principle should not affect any future application of this function. I have changed the multi-byte UTF8 signature to 'y0y'. The previous signature (0y similar to 0x notation for hex chars) was not completely isolated and could have produced wrong decoding under certain conditions. I have included here the helper functions encode() and decode() which encode strings, arrays and objects. These two functions are currently using a global var "non_encoding_fields" to skip the object or array keys which should not be encoded. /* * Replace all non alpha characters with numeric codes * I'm using this to convert all data before storing into mongoDB / mySQL */ function ...

I was trying to find a better way to store strings in my database, and after hours of researching string escape, mysql_real_escape_string, preg_quote and other variants, I decided to rethink the whole process. I needed a solution that would completely eliminate the escaping issue and would work with any database (sql or noSQL such as MongoDB). In the first run I came up with this line: preg_replace("/([^A-Za-z ,]{1})/eu", "' ' . ord(substr('\\1', strlen('\\1')-1, 1)) . ' '", $text); It converts all non alpha characters to their respective numeric codes, and also undoes the escaping of double quote characters which preg_replace will do when using /e modifier. However, as elegant and simple it may appear, this solution works only for ASCII encoded strings. To make it more universal I need to parse UTF-8. So here comes stage two: /* * replace all non alpha characters with numeric codes */ function remap_string( $text, $decode=false ) ...